More details to be provided... About our speaker: Dr. Joe Horn, a native of Charlottesville, Va., graduated from the University of Virginia and had never lived out of state till 1992 when he moved to Philadelphia to work for Piasecki. He stayed there four years then decided he needed formal study if he was going to advance in his profession and so applied to graduate school. He earned his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in 1999 and worked at Sikorsky Aircraft in Connecticut before joining the Penn State aerospace faculty in July 2000. Now an associate professor of aeronautical engineering and associate director of the U.S. Army Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence, Horn is back to working with flight simulators, albeit ones that are a little more complicated than the one he devised as a seventh grader. Ultimately, his mission is to make helicopters safer and more useful by improving the onboard systems that help pilots fly them and the simulators in which aircraft testing takes place and in which pilots train. A current project is improving how the automatic flight control system – its onboard computer -- responds to the turbulent air, rough seas, and poor visibility that make shipboard landings tricky and often dangerous.